QlikView / Qlik Sense Blog by Stefan Walther

Since Twitter’s Bootstrap library is very famous and common nowadays it’s quite natural that you might want to use Bootstrap styles within your Qlik Sense visualization extensions.

But …

If you just start straightforward and try to load Bootstrap’s CSS (which can be downloaded from here), you’ll not be that happy because something definitely unwanted happens. The styling of Qlik Sense completely crashes because of CSS conflicts respectively Bootstrap’s CSS is overruling some of Qlik Sense’ CSS styles:

Solution

But there’s an easy solution for this problem available. What we basically have to do is to “scope” Bootstrap’s style only to our extension and not to the rest of the document, so something like this

There is already a W3C proposal available to solve this problem, which allows you to create scoped CSS by adding the `scoped` attribute to a style element (read more here). Unfortunately this solution is – frankly speaking – not widely supported.

But you can achieve the same result with standard CSS:

.bootstrap_inside { }
.bootstrap_inside .btn {
/* now the class btn only works within the class bootstrap_inside */
}

Now it’s certainly not a practical solution to change the entire CSS library of Bootstrap manually. Just too much work and would also break if there are Bootstrap updates. Fortunately Bootstrap uses Less to generate the CSS, a CSS pre-processor which helps you to write cleaner CSS definitions.

Step by step instruction

The following instructions assume that you are familiar with the basics of Node.js, Bower and Grunt (or Gulp). All the steps demonstrated below can also be achieved manually or with other tools, but this just seems to be the easiest way for me.

Create a folder (we call it BootstrapExtension)

Inside the folder install Bootstrap using Bower:

bower install bootstrap

You’ll see a folder bower_compoents inside the folder BootstrapExtension. If you look into \BootstrapExtension\bower_components\bootstrap\less you’ll find all .less based styles of Bootstrap. The file bootstrap.less is the entry point for generating the entire Bootstrap CSS.

Create another folder called “less” where we put our main .less file (_root.less)

Your folder structure should then look like this

Then we have to add our bootstrap_inside class:

.bootstrap_inside {}

Nothing exciting so far but within this class we can now also include the main file from bootstrap. By doing so all the Bootstrap CSS definitions will then be “scoped” within .bootstrap_inside, so instead of generating .btn our less file will then generate .bootstrap_inside .btn {}

The idea behind the MediaBox Visualization Extension is to have on Visualization Extension for Qlik Sense which can serve different media types.

As of now the following media types are supported:

(External) Images

Videos

Web sites

Screenshots

Roadmap

I am planning to support more media types, but I need your feedback! What are the media types you’d like to see supported by this visualization extension for Qlik Sense? So far these are the ideas I am working on

I hope will see you there – I’m sure it will be fund, and I am really lookking forward to see the results at the evening on Sunday!!!

BTW, I’ll also show you some new nice QlikView.Next related examples – if you like …
Regards Stefan

We’re pleased to announce the inaugural Qlik Hackathon for Partners, scheduled to take place on April 6th, 2014 in Orlando, Florida, premiering at Qlik’s ninth annual partner conference, Qonnections 2014.
Registration for the Qlik Hackathon for Partners is now open at http://qlikhackathon.eventbrite.com.

Who Should Attend?
This event is for Partner individuals with strong web and JavaScript skills. Participants will form groups of 2. If you do not have a buddy to team up with, don’t worry; the Qlik Hackathon team will find you a match with another participant.
What is the Hackathon?
Teams will be presented with several challenges involving the international humanitarian organization MedAir. Developers must use web skills, data, and the QlikView.Next APIs to achieve new insights and/or visualizations that best address the challenge. Every Hackathon participant will have hands-on access to QlikView.Next and its new capabilities in web integration, with ‘live’ enablement and support from internal QlikView experts moderating the event.

How to Register
Registration for the Qlik Hackathon is now open at http://qlikhackathon.eventbrite.com. Act fast as there are only 40 places available, to be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to be part of a day filled with technical web indulgence, exposure to QlikView.Next’s API capabilities, plus learning and competition to spark some fun!